Two RVI reports highlight the growing crisis in Sudan. Decisions and Deadlines: A critical year for Sudan, by Edward Thomas, analyses the dangers the country faces in the current election year. The report, co-published by Chatham House, the International Rescue Committee and the Rift Valley Institute, analyses the complexities of the electoral process and the risk of renewed war. The overarching question, it argues, is whether the Sudanese state can represent the interests of all Sudan’s peoples, or only the elites in the centre.

Eddie Thomas, Director of the 2009 RVI Sudan Course, is the author of a policy paper on Sudan's political future, Against the Gathering Storm: Securing Sudan's Comprehensive Peace Agreement (2009). Sally Healy, a member of the teaching staff of the RVI Horn of Africa Course is the author of a study of peace processes in the region, Lost Opportunities in the Horn of Africa (2008). The latter is the final paper from a series of specialist meetings jointly organised by Chatham House, the Rift Valley Institute, the Royal Institute of African Affairs and the School of Oriental and African Studies. Other publications arising from the meetings include; Ethiopia and Eritrea: Allergic to Persuasion by Sally Healy and Martin Plaut, The Rise and Fall of Mogadishu’s Islamic Courts by Cedric Barnes and Harun Hassan and Sudan: Where is the Comprehensive Peace Agreement Heading? by Sally Healy. A book based on a conference co-sponsored by the RVI was recently published by Hurst: China Returns to Africa is edited by Chris Alden, Daniel Large and Ricardo Soares.

An expanded version of the Sudan Open Archive is now online, featuring an improved user interface and access to around a thousand books and documents about Sudan. SOA 2.0 is a searchable, full-text database that covers all regions of the country, making a wide range of material available in digital form for the first time. It contains dictionaries, human rights reports, historical material on the environment and extensive documentation of local peace meetings in Southern and Western Sudan. There are also key documents on national politics. Among the many books and reports in the Archive are The Dhein Massacre by Ushari Mahmud and Suliman Baldo, the report of the Abyei Boundaries Commission, dictionaries of Sudanese Arabic and Juba Arabic and F.W.Andrews' three-volume The Flowering Plants of Sudan. SOA 2.0 also incorporates an internet guide with links to several hundred Sudan-related websites, searchable by key words.

Marol Academy is a community primary school in Southern Sudan, in Warab state. It opened in 2008 with 350 students and seven teachers. Hundreds of would-be students had to be turned away. Despite the North-South peace agreement of 2005 the new government of South Sudan has been slow to rebuild the educational system; the Marol Academy is one of a handful of functioning schools in the state. The school was founded by Dr Jok Madut Jok, an RVI Fellow born in Warab. Unusually, in a region where women have historically been excluded from education, it has more girl pupils than boys. There are over two hundred girls studying there, the result of an extended campaign to persuade local families to send their daughters to school. The Academy is, in the words of its founder, Dr Jok Madut Jok, “a girls’ school that takes boys”.

China Returns to Africa, edited by Chris Alden, Daniel Large and Ricardo Soares, is based on an international conference in Cambridge co-sponsored by the Institute.

The book, published by Hurst, is a multidisciplinary examination of Chinese approaches to Africa, including papers on the history of China’s relations with Tanzania and Sudan.

The Institute has updated its report, Local Peace Processes in Sudan. The report offers an analytical account of the growth of “people-to-people” peace meetings in Sudan and its borderlands. The new version includes an expanded bibliography and up-dated time-chart of peace meetings over the last two decades in Southern and Northern Sudan (including Darfur and the transitional zone between North and South). Full-text versions of reports cited in the bibliography have been incorporated into the Sudan Open Archive.

The Sudan Abductee Database is the outcome of an eighteen-month field investigation in Bahr-el-Ghazal, Southern Sudan. A revised and updated version was made available in 2005. The investigation was designed to create a record of persons abducted during the civil war in Southern Sudan by militias operating out of Government-controlled areas of the North. RVI researchers recorded the details of more than 10,000 individual abductees.